Paragon-Only Daily Powers

I had this utterly bewildering idea just now which I’m still trying to parse.

First it’s worth noting that in my current designs, I’ve essentially reverted to the “classic” forms for 4e classes — that’s two class features, two at-will attacks, one encounter attack, and one daily attack power.

Second to note — is that I’ve removed most of the “additional combat options” from the hypothetical ‘Combat Chapter,’ and redistributed stuff like Grab and Charge Attack to the various classes where they make the most sense.

So I’m left with much more archetypal character classes. Groovy.

Well, last week I made those “Run and Gun” classes I just told you about — and I’m looking at them and wondering what the next step I should take with them ought to be. I’m thinking, “well I’ve done the hard part of writing class features and at-will attacks, I need encounter and daily attacks. So what should I do?”

And in the back of my mind, I have this anxious voice reminding me about “paragon paths” and “epic destinies” and other, miscellaneous-yet-non-trivial stuff that I’ll have to account for along the way.

Then I had this thought — as much as I already like putting off difficult stuff for later, this seemed totally reasonable — that I might remove daily attack powers entirely from the Heroic tier and push them all back to Paragon tier.

For starters, this would make Heroic tier all about renewable resources — from top to bottom. You have your encounter powers and your at-will powers, and you have passive effects. You won’t receive “non-renewable” resources ’til Paragon.

If we have the whole inverted-adventure model where Heroic tier begins with forays into “the wilderness” and escalates to “dungeon crawls” in Paragon tier, then those Daily powers will represent the dramatic increase in power necessary for overcoming terrifying new dangers. “There’s no resting in the dungeon.”

Daily powers being exclusive to the Paragon tier would also give that tier something to make it unique — the current spread of powers ranging from at-will to encounter to daily can be confusing, and gets kind of stale after a fashion.

What we’d have instead — as far as power combo platters go — is at-will attacks from 1st level, with a steady accumulation of encounter powers all the way through the Heroic tier. Then in Paragon tier we get Daily attack powers for a taste of “Real Ultimate Power” all through to the end.

Epic tier tops us off with powers to cheat death — and throughout each of the three tiers, we gain feats to bridge the “dead levels” — even-numbered levels.

I’ll need to think about this some more, but it would be an effective way to super-charge the otherwise stale Paragon tier — at least as far as new types of power are concerned — and it would be a way to make paragon paths distinct.